Microsoft released Windows 10 Build 10049 late on March 30. This iteration has only gone out to the "fast" ring of Windows Insiders, people who opt to receive updates as soon as they're available and before any bugs have been addressed.

Although Windows 10 will continue to feature Internet Explorer for business users who rely on the browser, Project Spartan will become the primary source for Internet access. Spartan will feature Microsoft's new Edge rendering engine over IE, an indicator that this is the browser of the future.

Users have been promised a number of upgrades when Spartan launches in full, including speedy and lightweight browsing, an improved reading mode, and the ability to comment and draw on Web pages. Cortana will also make an appearance to help users who have questions or want more information while browsing.

Microsoft is still working on a name, but Spartan is an appropriate nickname for a browser that lacks many bells and whistles in its early stages. Despite its minimalist design, it's pretty functional, with fast loading and responsiveness to swipes and scrolls. I also found that it handled plenty of browser tabs without slowing down.

Google rolled out a new application for mobile devices running its Android operating system software that gives users a unified inbox for a number of different email accounts, including Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail accounts.

By using the new All Inboxes option, users can now read and respond to all their email messages without having to jump between different accounts.

One of Gmail's most popular features, threaded conversations, has been extended to Yahoo, Outlook.com, and other IMAP/POP accounts, and will appear stacked as one conversation.

Google has also improved auto-complete for the Android app, making it easier to search the inbox more quickly.

The update includes larger attachment previews, more responsive animations (such as those for opening and closing a conversation), and the ability to save to Drive with one click.

"These days, many of us have more than one email address. If you're a student, you may have one account for school, one for a campus group you lead, and one for your blog," Régis Décamps, a Google software engineer, who detailed the March 30 announcement on the company’s Official Gmail Blog. "If you're a parent, you might have one for family and one for your business. However many email addresses you have, today's improvements to the Gmail app for Android make it easy to manage all your mail from all your accounts while you're on the go."

While the app is available immediately for Android users, the company failed to mention whether the app would find its way onto arch-rival Apple's iPhone at any time.

One feature Google did bring to iPhones earlier this month was the new Google Calendar, which brings Android features like Events from Gmail. This function turns emails into Calendar events automatically. Another, Schedule View, makes the calendar easier to scan.

Google is not the only one looking to expand the reach of its apps to other users. On March 23, Microsoft announced that it would bring many of its productivity apps, such as Word and Excel, to a variety of different Android smartphones made by Samsung and Dell. The idea here is not to compete head-to-head, but to persuade users of other platforms to use different tools by making them easily accessible and tailored to their needs.

Another feature included in the latest Google Gmail update is Assists. This feature makes suggestions designed to save users time in creating events.

The survey also found 38% of users with business emails had two email addresses, and 5% had three or more, indicating Google's move to make mobile email simpler and more holistic would push things in the right direction.

A study released earlier in March by physical security provider Kensington found mobile devices are extending the work day, with 40% of respondents admitting they check their email within 15 minutes of waking up, and an additional 21% checking email while in bed at the end of the day.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

The world runs on files. Every bit of digital information eventually ends up in one or more files: From the simplest text file to files that capture the intricacies of a product or the blueprint for a high-rise. It's all files, and files are a pain to store and manage.

Beneath the calm humming of any file-intensive organization, there is a storage engineer shoveling coal into the engine in order to ensure that there is always plenty of capacity, that the files are protected, and that they are available conveniently and quickly to the people who need them. The sheer volume of files and the expectations for anytime, anywhere access have never been higher than they are today. And all of a sudden, NAS is sexy -- again.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a dedicated storage server whose sole purpose is to host files and make them available to the Local Area Network (LAN). NAS has become the way IT stores, protects, and makes files available to end-users and to applications.

At the heart of a great NAS is a rock-solid file system. The first great migration of files into the network defined the performance and functional requirements of NAS. Monolithic NAS architectures enjoyed a decade of strong growth with single, powerful controllers. It would take the rise of the Internet to create the next set of requirements, which strained even the most powerful monolithic architectures beyond their technical limits.

The Internet took file storage and sharing to a whole other level. I happened to be on the frontlines working with several large media companies, including The New York Times, as we struggled to create an infrastructure that would scale to millions of users. First came throngs of users, and soon after came an explosion in the number and size of files as everything went digital: Pictures, music, movies, everything. Overnight, the physical world was transformed into files. Monolithic NAS architectures couldn’t support the access load, and IT struggled to increase capacity fast enough.

In order to conquer scale, the industry chose to divide the monolithic NAS controller into clusters of smaller NAS controllers. The new architecture became Scale-Out NAS (SONAS) and the leader that emerged at that time was Isilon, now part of EMC, with its OneFS file system. History repeats, and progress has a way of pushing every technology to its breaking point. The Achilles’s Heel of SONAS is its insistence that the file system and the hardware clusters be one and the same. This works well while the files are concentrated in a single location, but modern organizations need a NAS platform that helps them span the globe.

Another great file migration is underway, and this time files are going to the cloud. The scalability problems that began in media companies have become commonplace in all of the file-heavy industries, including engineering, healthcare, architecture, legal, and life sciences. Unlike traditional media outlets, these organizations need their NAS everywhere.

A couple of modern approaches put files in the cloud in order to enable massive scale and the global synchronization of files. It is still too early to tell which approach will emerge as the winner, but when it comes to files, distributed organizations can already benefit from a wide range of choices within these two ways to approach files. The software plays -- such as Dropbox, Box, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Google’s GDrive -- are terrific in their support of files for mobile users, but they lack the performance, scale, and the standard protocols used in the data center.

Today, the software approach represents a storage island, great for mobile files but largely incompatible with the existing infrastructure. However, vendors in this space have their eyes on the lucrative enterprise market, and they will evolve.

There is also a third wave of cloud-based NAS (including Avere, cTera, Nasuni, and Panzura) that uses dedicated hardware appliances to deliver performance to the data center while leveraging the cloud for scale and the global synchronization of files. Today, most of these providers offer limited mobile support, but that too is changing.

Files are not going away. In fact the opposite is true. The race is on for a single storage platform that can reliably store all of the files required and deliver them quickly to any location or device. The data center remains relevant, but files are moving to where they can be most useful and less painful: a cloud-based core -- a giant engine for storage and data synchronization. The cloud expands the capabilities of NAS in the data center to a technology able to store billions of files and make them available worldwide with the same appliance-like simplicity that made NAS successful in the first place. This generation of NAS is about scale, performance, and the agility to make data available anywhere on earth. This is not your grandfather's NAS.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Microsoft today announced the Surface 3, a tablet that splits the difference between the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 3 in terms of features and price. It also effectively buries Windows RT. By switching from ARM processors to Intel, the Surface 3 is able to run Windows 8.1 with a Windows 10 upgrade on deck for later this year.

At $499, the Surface 3 tablet is a less expensive option for businesses looking to equip mobile professionals with a device that fills several different roles.

The Surface 3 is thinner and lighter than the Pro model, but is compatible with the Pro's pen and detachable keyboard. Microsoft says the device is ideal for those seeking to pair productivity with portability.

The tablet's screen measures 10.8 inches and has full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080 pixels). The display has a 3:2 aspect ratio -- the same as Surface Pro 3 -- and supports 10-point multi-touch input. Intel's 1.6-GHz quad-core x7-Z87000 processor powers the tablet with Intel Burst technology up to 2.4 GHz. The base configuration includes 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, but both can be doubled for $100. It weighs 1.37 pounds. Battery life is rated at 10 hours of video playback.

Microsoft gave the Surface 3 a solid set of hardware features. For example, it boasts a three-position kickstand to allow for different usage scenarios. The tablet includes a full-sized USB 3.0 port in addition to a Mini DisplayPort, a microSD card reader, a micro USB charging port, and a headset jack.

These will allow mobile pros to expand the functionality of the tablet through accessories. WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 cover most connection needs, but an LTE version of the tablet will be made available, too. (T-Mobile was quick to say it will support the LTE version.) It also includes an 8-megapixel main camera, a 3.5-megapixel user camera, stereo speakers with Dolby audio, and a microphone.

As far as productivity goes, the Surface 3 kicks RT to the ground and runs a full version of Windows 8.1.

The original Surface RT and follow-up Surface 2 both ran the in-between version of Windows that is, for all intents and purposes, at the end of its road. Adding Windows 8.1 to the Surface 3 -- and promising a free upgrade to Windows 10 -- should go a long way to boost the tablet's appeal. In addition to Windows 8.1, Microsoft is giving buyers a free year subscription to Office 365, complete with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access. The device includes some OneDrive cloud storage and 60 Skype world minutes each month for 12 months.

The $499 starting price undercuts the Surface Pro 3 by several hundred dollars, but the Surface 3 isn't nearly as customizable as its more professional older sibling.

Based on Microsoft's website, only the storage and RAM can be changed, the processor cannot. Microsoft hasn't released details for the LTE-equipped variant. Expect it to cost about $100 more than the WiFi-only version. Moreover, vital accessories such as the keyboard and pen are not included. The keyboard alone costs another $129.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Last week it was Couchbase. On Tuesday, March 31, MongoDB pointed to third-party research that shows its product delivers superior performance to that of its rivals. Whose research can you believe?

As we reported last week, Couchbase started this database-performance claim war by offering research conducted by Avalon Consulting LLC -- clearly sponsored by Couchbase -- that shows the Couchbase NoSQL database management system beating MongoDB on multiple performance measures.

The key point of Avalon's whitepaper was that the matchup was against MongoDB 3.0, that vendor's latest release featuring the recently acquired Wired Tiger 3.0 storage engine. The new storage engine substantially improves that product's write performance and scalability, according to MongoDB, yet by Avalon's measures, Couchbase had higher throughput and concurrency in every test.

MongoDB naturally begged to differ with Avalon's findings, noting that the Couchbase configuration used in the test harnessed three times more hardware than the MongoDB configuration, while the latter deployment had an automatic-failover feature turned off, contrary to MongoDB best practices. "If MongoDB were configured comparably to Couchbase in these tests, the results would be dramatically different," stated Kelly Stirman, MongoDB's director of products, in a comment on that story.

The research sponsored and released by MongoDB on Tuesday was carried out by United Software Associates. It compared MongoDB to Cassandra and Couchbase. The report states that the test featured identical hardware for all three products and featured a Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark test of insert, updata, and read performance.

Predictably, MongoDB won on every measure in United Software Associates' tests, including different workloads and measures of database throughput, durability, and balanced combinations of both. The key twist in this test is that in all cases it featured a single-database-server and a single-client-server, a configuration that hardly stresses scalability or the highly-distributed nature of typical NoSQL database deployments -- or at least those of Cassandra and Couchbase. For MongoDB, it's common to see single-server deployments, according to Stirman.

"Databases are often deployed on a single server, and we know that based on about 60,000 MongoDB deployments that we have access to via our cloud-management tool," said Stirman in a phone interview with InformationWeek. "When run in a distributed fashion, all of these systems are comprised of multiple, individual servers, so you have to start by looking at what a single server delivers [in terms of performance]."

Contrary to this suggestion, scaled-out performance -- much less scaled-out performance across multiple data centers -- is rarely a clear multiple of single-server performance. In fact, Stirman acknowledged that "it's harder to do an apples-to-apples comparison that way because these products scale out in very different ways."

While Avalon's research featured multi-server configurations and tested concurrency in excess of 500 simultaneous users, United's research tested a single database server and a single client server, with no mention of concurrency demands. On the other hand, Avalon's tests used very different hardware configurations for the two products tested, and MongoDB contends its deployment best practices were ignored.

MongoDB's sponsored research was covered by nondisclosure agreements at this writing, so we have to leave it to Cassandra promoter DataStax and Couchbase to share their take on tests in the comments area below. Suffice it to say that the most reliable tests of database performance are independently verified tests such as TCP benchmarks. Sponsored research invariably delivers exactly what the sponsors pay for: a winning result.

Even better than an abstract benchmark test like a TCP is a proof-of-concept test using your own data and your own anticipated workloads. Only this type of real-world testing will tell you how products will perform in your environment. In the bargain, your people will also gain experience with the features, security, manageability, and ease of development of the products. On this point we're in agreement with Stirman of MongoDB.

"There's a long list of things you should look at, and performance is part of that consideration," he said.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Software giant Adobe is reaching out to Apple-centric designers with its Comp CC application for the iPad, an app that enables the rapid creation of layout concepts for mobile, Web, and print projects.

The free app, which is available for download through the Apple App Store, lets users export a native file to the designer's choice of InDesign CC, Photoshop CC, or Illustrator CC. That file automatically opens on the desktop, letting users build on their original idea.

Built on the Adobe Creative SDK, Comp CC, which is available in 15 languages, couples gestures, fonts from Typekit, and the personal assets stored in Creative Cloud Libraries.

Gesture controls are a major element of the app. For instance, users can trace a quick outline for basic shapes or editable text boxes, and mark it with an "X" to make an image frame.

Another gesture control allows users to drop in lines of placeholder text by swiping a finger across the tablet's screen.

Users can also import saved asset collections from Creative Cloud Libraries or ready-made vector graphics and icons from the Creative Cloud Market. The use of Adobe mobile apps requires a free, basic level of Creative Cloud membership, which includes 2GB of complementary storage for file syncing and sharing.

For users requiring more than 2GB of Creative Cloud file storage, the company offers the option of purchasing an additional 20GB for $1.99 a month. The recurring payment is automatically charged to the user's iTunes account.

Adobe is also working to improve integration between its applications, giving users the ability to access graphics they have created in Photoshop or Illustrator or drawings from Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw. They can also pull in what they've captured in Shape CC and Color CC.

Another major concept of the app is ease of management. A single source file and included history mean that every version of every layout is saved. This feature is designed to help creators avoid taking up storage space with files that will only be discarded later.

"Comp CC takes advantage of the iPad's advanced touch screen with an intuitive interface and makes the beginning of the design process integral to the finished result," Scott Belsky, vice-president of products at Adobe, wrote on March 30 in the company's blog. "Doing creative work on a mobile device is only useful if the results can be opened on the desktop, where the project can be perfected in a precise, professional-grade tool like InDesign or Photoshop."

Similar to Adobe's family of Creative Cloud mobile apps, Comp CC can be used on an individual basis. It can also be used by a creative team within an enterprise. It has support for Federated ID single sign-on (SSO), in which a user's individual authentication token is trusted across multiple IT systems or organizations.

The company started work on the project, previously called LayUp, about two years ago, and previewed the software at its MAX conference.

Adobe also noted that a major update to Creative Cloud is expected in the coming months. It will introduce new ways for users to connect their creative work across mobile and desktop, while boosting productivity efficiency.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

PayPal has completed a three-year migration from a typical mixed-enterprise data center to an OpenStack private cloud.

PayPal processed $228 billion in payments on its infrastructure last year, making it one of the largest financial services OpenStack clouds in production.

PayPal runs 8,500 standardized x86 servers under OpenStack to provide 162 million customers with information, mobile application support, website interactions, and payment processing. Stateless interactions (such as a PayPal's front-end presentations in response to customer requests for information) and stateful interactions (such as a backend database receiving information provided by the customer) are being processed on OpenStack.

"We have converted nearly 100% of our traffic serving, Web/API applications, and mid-tier services at PayPal to run on our internal private cloud," said Sri Shivananda, VP for global platform and infrastructure, in an interview with InformationWeek.

But Shivananda and PayPal spokesmen were also careful to note that a few legacy systems remain in place, without specifying which ones.

Financial services firms often decline to reveal much about their infrastructure, seeking to avoid the possibility of making it easier for malicious hackers to get inside. But it's well known that some of the world's largest financial institutions, including Bank of New York Mellon, State Street Bank, and Bank of America, have reorganized their infrastructure to function into a more uniform architecture with more automated processes.

In PayPal's case, the OpenStack transition wasn't only a move to a more automated infrastructure. It was an internal cultural change as well, said Shivananda. The change undertaken by the IT staff "goes well beyond server provisioning," he said.

PayPal knew it wanted to revamp its data center infrastructure in 2011, when OpenStack was little more than a young work-in-progress. It experimented with building out a more automated infrastructure, relying in part on VMware virtualization.

OpenStack caught its attention early on, however, and eventually "there were five to six versions of it" among the implementations that PayPal software teams were working with, said Shivananda. "After a while, we had to converge the stack," he said. "That helped us learn a lot about managing OpenStack."

PayPal's OpenStack Upgrade Process

PayPal has also been forced to upgrade OpenStack as a new release appears, roughly every six months. "It's an eye-opening experience to upgrade OpenStack," said Shivananda. "We have built a ton of experience around the upgrade process."

The organization has adopted a set of processes and procedures around an OpenStack upgrade, which includes establishing a war room and appointing a commander of the process. According to Shivananda, it's important "to bring consistency to the table and take fleet-wide actions," keeping the 8,500 server mass "homogenous" and not allowing it to drift into segments operating under different versions of OpenStack. That means 180,000 data center assets – servers, top-of-rack switches, firewalls, load balancers, and storage volumes -- all function as part of the PayPal OpenStack cloud.

Doing so allows IT to operate PayPal data centers in a routine and automated way, Shivananda continued. If a data center server, switch, or storage volume failed in the past, it was common practice to send a staff member to fix the issue as soon as possible. Under OpenStack, the processing on a failing device is switched over to healthy ones. Mechanical failures are tolerated in the OpenStack cloud until it's time for a routine sweep that fixes or removes all types of failed devices and brings replacements online. Instead of technicians working on, say, 1% of stalled, troubled, and failed devices, they may be working on as many as 3% to 5%, under the periodic sweep method of operating, he said.

The PayPal cloud has its own sensing mechanisms to detect when hardware is acting up or about to fail.

The main goal behind the automated method of operations is to provision PayPal development teams quickly when they need a set of servers. In the rapidly changing field of mobile payments, PayPal is keeping up by allowing frequent updates to dozens of applications.

"There's not an hour in the day when we're not rolling out software patches and updates," Shivananda said. "We're a high frequency of change environment." That would not be possible without the conversion to an OpenStack infrastructure. The uniformity of what makes up the infrastructure, and the predictability of how it will run, make it possible to impose frequent software changes.

The IT staff's next challenge is to incorporate use of Docker containers into its OpenStack cloud, Shivananda said.

Asked to clarify an old controversy, Shivananda said PayPal, once a VMware virtualization shop, has backed off its dependence on VMware and uses OpenStack for its compute virtualization. That means it relies on the OpenStack default, KVM open source hypervisor on many compute hosts, instead of VMware's ESX Server. However, he added, "VMware remains core in our network virtualization." Virtual machine provisioning and lifecycle management are now done under OpenStack.

Two years ago, Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, an OpenStack consulting firm that was doing work at PayPal at the time, said that PayPal would convert to OpenStack and parent company eBay would follow, replacing VMware in the process.

Shivananda didn't comment on eBay's infrastructure plans, other than to say both companies have their own plans and schedules to get to an OpenStack cloud. PayPal and eBay are in the process of becoming separate companies, and each has its own infrastructure. The separation is expected to become official in the second half of 2015.

Asked if PayPal used a private label version of OpenStack -- both Mirantis and VMware produce their own distributions -- Shivananda said it had developed its own staff expertise and installed its own version, without relying on an outside vendor's configuration.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

When attendees pick up their badges at Interop Las Vegas, they'll immediately be able to join the wireless network and be productive. Exhibitors will find their booths cabled and ready for high-speed network demonstrations. It's no surprise that the network is key to Interop.

What many attendees don't realize is that, like any good Vegas show, the entire InteropNet is built and tested long before it appears live at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. InteropNet first springs to life in a Silicon Valley warehouse at an event known as Hot Stage.

Large networks are complicated. There's no news value in that statement. When people attend a conference about cutting-edge networks, they expect the network to, well, work. That's also a statement that carries no surprise. Put the two together, and you have the reason that engineers, network architects, and technicians representing a wide range of technology vendors have gathered in advance of Interop each year for decades. Hot Stage is where new ideas are tried and mistakes are made. It's also where the ramifications of all those new ideas and mistakes are dealt with and corrected, long before the first attendee or expo floor vendor connects to the network. The entire undertaking holds lessons in collaboration and flexibility that can benefit CIOs and IT professionals of all stripes.

For the first time, Interop has welcomed a journalist to Hot Stage. I've spent a week in the warehouse talking to the engineers and taking photos of the action. The slides here are the first few in a large group of photos we'll be bringing you of the back-stage action. In addition, InformationWeek and Interop are cooperating in a daily radio show, the Hot Stage Diaries, on BlogTalkRadio.

What questions do you have about Hot Stage and the InteropNet? Let me know in the comments section below, and I'll take your questions -- and comments -- to the InteropNet team. We're less than a month from Interop Las Vegas. The network is getting ready.

IBM last fall introduced an Internet of Things Foundation service on its BlueMix cloud-based application platform. On Tuesday the company announced something much more substantial: a plan to invest more than $3 billion over the next four years to build a dedicated IoT business unit staffed by more than 2,000 consultants, researchers, and developers.

In addition to establishing a dedicated business unit for IoT, IBM announced it's building a cloud-based platform to help clients and ecosystem partners better integrate real-time data and insights from dispersed sources, such as sensors, directly into business operations. In a separate IoT-related announcement, IBM announced a new IoT ecosystem partnership with The Weather Company, which will add IBM as a cloud services provider.

The IoT Foundation introduced last year offered developers a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to simplify the process of accessing data from Internet-connected devices. The growing, cloud-based platform will add:

IBM Bluemix IoT Zone: Offering new IoT services to support the integration of IoT data into cloud-based apps. IBM foresees developers enriching existing enterprise-asset-management, facilities-management, and software-engineering design tools with more real-time data and embedded analytics to further automate and optimize IoT applications.

IBM IoT Ecosystem: This ecosystem will expand partnerships with existing chip, device, and industry partners including ARM, AT&T, and Semtech, and, newly announced, The Weather Company -– to ensure the secure and seamless integration of data services and solutions on IBM’s open platform.

IBM is not alone in pursuing IoT business. Earlier this month Microsoft introduced an IoT suite on its Azure cloud. Amazon, Cisco, General Electric, and Intel are among the other tech giants floating IoT-specific offerings. Competition will no doubt be fiercest among cloud giants Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft around the depth of IoT services versus pricing.

IBM And The Weather Company

The Weather Company, parent of The Weather Channel among other businesses, currently runs its massive weather-data-services platform -- which captures more than 20 terabytes of data per day to drive predictions -- exclusively on Amazon Web Services, but has long planned for multi-cloud operation.

"I believe that any serious cloud-based business or application needs to be built in a cloud-agnostic way," Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler told InformationWeek in an email interview. "TWC has been on that journey for the last three years, and that's what has enabled us to deploy our data services platform onto IBM SoftLayer so we can power our business and strategic opportunities with IBM beyond what we could do with AWS alone."

IBM said weather data from The Weather Company's WSI (B2B) unit will be available to IBM IoT and industry ecosystem customers so they can power decisions related to supply chains and customer buying patterns with rapidly updated forecasts.

By creating a dedicated business unit, IBM will bring more scale and focus to IoT opportunities, according to Sam Adams, and IBM Research distinguished engineer.

"While IBM has had many IoT-related engagements with clients and a number of offerings in recent years, they were delivered as a value-adding technology to a broader solution, such as our Smarter Planet initiatives," Adams stated in an email interview with InformationWeek. "Given the maturity we see in our client's adoption of big data and analytics in both mobile and cloud contexts, we feel that the time is right for IoT to become a mainstream source of enterprise innovation across many industries."

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Last week we saw Interop Radio move into high gear with a great show on Tuesday and a full week of the Hot Stage Diaries. Things aren't slowing down this week as the activity at Hot Stage turns to the SDN Lab. We have an episode of Interop Radio centered on all the networks (and network technology) not defined by software. Whether you're planning to join us in Las Vegas, or are part of the Interop community that meets us online, you'll want to be part of Interop Radio every day this week.

Interop Radio

If you follow the enterprise networking press (and really, why wouldn't you?) then you would be excused for thinking that SDN is the only thing that matters in the world of moving bits from place to place. The truth, though, is that the vast majority of networks deployed today are still defined by switches, routers, and old-fashioned configuration methods, rather than by software.

In the episode of Interop Radio airing at 3:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 31, we'll be talking about all the networks that aren't SDN, and why these "traditional" networks are still important -- and still evolving. On Interop Radio: The Network Beyond SDN, you'll get insight and analysis from our guest, Ethan Banks. He is cohost of the popular Packet Pushers Podcast, and is scheduled to speak during Interop in Las Vegas, April 27-May 1. What sort of things might we discuss? We could start with one of these:

Improving communications between IT and business stakeholders.

IPv6 -- coming of age, finally?

Should your network mirror cloud scale architecture?

Troubleshooting skills matter more than ever for networkers.

Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials, high tech, and medical since 1995. The Packet Pushers Podcast has seen millions of downloads and reaches more than 10,000 listeners worldwide.

Hot Stage Diaries

Each day this week a new "page" in the Hot Stage Diaries will come your way at 7:00 p.m. ET. These shows will take you inside the secret location where Hot Stage takes place, bringing you the stories as the teams come together to build one of the world's largest, most complex, temporary networks. There will be feature stories and interviews with the professionals charged with making technology from many companies come together to serve the Interop Community when it meets at Interop 2015.

Join us every day to keep up with the rapidly developing network as the attention of the engineers and architects turns to the SDN Labs.

Find Us On iTunes

Does your busy schedule make it easier for you to listen to great audio when you're on the go? Interop Radio is available as a podcast on iTunes. Simply subscribe to Interop Radio on iTunes and you'll get all the great Interop Radio shows (including the Hot Stage Diaries and every Interop LIVE! show from Interop 2015) right on your smartphone or other mobile device.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization's IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Amazon can now help you rent goats and perform aerial yoga, though not necessarily at the same time.

On Monday, the company launched Amazon Home Services, an online market for professional services. Customers can use the service to hire "handpicked pros" for jobs related to home improvement, landscaping, appliances, electronics, and automobiles, among other things.

Home Depot and Lowe's already offer similar online markets for home-oriented professional services, to say nothing of search-oriented services like Angie's List and Yelp. But Amazon's familiar and widely used e-commerce interface may appeal to those who are looking to hire service professionals.

Amazon Home Services is now available to varying degrees in major US metropolitan areas, with the highest density of services offered in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

People seeking grazing goats will be disappointed unless they live near Seattle. Goats turn out to be an ecologically friendly and cost-effective way to clear brush and reduce the danger of fires. The "Hire a Goat Grazer Beta" option was unavailable in San Francisco Bay Area zip codes and other parts of the country.

Mike Canady, owner of California Grazing, which rents goats to Silicon Valley firms such as Google, as well as various local government agencies, hadn't heard that Amazon had gotten into the goat business.

In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Canady suggested that his business wasn't really set up to deliver goats on demand to individual homeowners. He said he dealt mainly with large clients and large areas of land – parks, airports, drainage channels, and multiple yards through homeowners associations.

Amazon Home Services extends to training, just as Google is getting out of that business. In 2013, Google launched a service called Helpouts, to connect customers with online experts selling services and education. On April 20, 2015, Google plans to close Helpouts because it didn't grow at the expected rate. Google hasn't fared well when it comes to paid knowledge services for consumers: It closed Google Answers in 2006 and Knol in 2012.

Amazon is offering a Happiness Guarantee, in which it promises to "work with you and your pro to help ensure the job gets done right," or to provide a refund. If that doesn't happen, or leaves damage unaddressed, customers can file an Amazon A-to-Z Guarantee claim – if the service is eligible – to obtain reimbursement of up to $2,500 for unsatisfactory jobs. Beyond that, there's always court, for which there's not (yet) a one-click resolution option. Amazon also says that if customers find the same service from the same pro elsewhere for less, it will match the lower price.

Consumers may find Amazon's involvement appealing because ordering through Amazon.com makes pricing clear and simplifies payment and scheduling. Amazon said it won't charge customer credit cards until work has been completed.

Amazon said it only hires pros it has invited to participate in its service, though it allows anyone to apply to be invited. The company said that it runs a background check on businesses, which must provide Amazon with required business licenses and proof of insurance, and that individual service providers who travel to customers' homes must pass a six-point background check. Presumably, goats are exempt from such scrutiny.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

It combines the scalability and variable-data adaptability of Hadoop, the in-memory analysis speed of Apache Spark, and the agility and usability of a cloud-based tool designed for business analysts.

These are the traits that ClearStory Data promises. With a new release of its cloud service announced on Monday, the company said it's delivering greater control over data-blending and analysis, more types of analyses, and better performance, due to behind-the-scenes integration of the latest (version 1.2) data-processing engine from Apache Spark, the distributed, in-memory analytics platform.

"Previously customers would load their data and use our tool to find correlations using our data-harmonization engine, but it was almost like a black box," said Vaibhav Nivargi, ClearStory's co-founder and chief architect in a phone interview with InformationWeek. "With the new release, we're striking a balance between the simplicity of delivering automated recommendations and giving power users a lot more flexibility and control over how they harmonize data."

When users upload data into the ClearStory service, it's stored in on a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). This infrastructure, which is managed entirely by ClearStory, lets customers blend a variety of high-scale data without predefined data modeling or complex ETL work. The data is then blended, and notable overlaps and correlations exposed after processing in Apache Spark's core in-memory query-optimization engine. Business users work in a ClearStory-developed Storyboard analysis environment rather than using Spark tools such as Spark SQL, MLlib, Spark Streaming, or GraphX.

"Business users who can conceptually understand forecasting, clustering, or segmentation don't want to be burdened with picking algorithms and parameters or creating and serializing models," said Nivargi. "With Storyboards you can do statistical operations, find correlations in data, drill in or out based on attributes in the data set, and you can bring in external data sets and create joins, which we call harmonization."

Storyboards are more flexible than dashboards, according to Nivargi, because they can be changed, adapted, and augmented with new data by business users, whereas dashboard changes often have to be handled by IT staff or power users.

With its combination of graphical data-exploration and data-analysis capabilities, the ClearStory service seems to have much in common with Databricks Cloud, the Spark-based service (currently in beta) offered by the developer and promoter of Apache Spark. Other products that come to mind include Platfora and Datameer, though these are on-premises tools (with the latter having a software-hosting option).

ClearStory is different from the Databrick Cloud because the latter is "something for more sophisticated users, including data scientists, who are comfortable coding in Scala, Spark SQL, or Python," according to Nivargi. And ClearStory doesn't compete with Platfora and Datameer, he said, because those tools are deployed on top of customer-managed Hadoop deployments. ClearStory, in contrast, manages the data infrastructure behind its services in the cloud, and that complexity is not exposed to the customer.

In another differentiator, ClearStory touts data-lineage and data-access controls required by regulated businesses. The new release is said to show the origin of source data and its original structure and shape, even after it's blended into larger data sets exposed and analyzed within ClearStory. Also new in the upgrade is a guided user model designed to enable line-of-business users without deep IT or BI training to access, prepare, blend, and harmonize data.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Industry giants including Samsung and Panasonic are expanding new open source groups. Jaguar Land Rover came to the event saying it will make open source its connected car software, challenging competitors to do the same.

In IoT, Linux commands the gateway today, with ambitious efforts to pack it into end nodes. It already runs on microcontrollers, with some developers aiming at a Mbyte-size version of the open source operating system, one speaker said.

Apple is going upscale in a way it never has before in order to sell its high-priced wearable. The Apple Watch goes on sale April 24, but you won't be able to simply walk into a store and buy one. Instead, Apple will require appointments for watch seekers.

It's clear Apple is taking its forthcoming smartwatch very seriously. The company has begun to prepare its retail stores for the device, and will include dedicated areas for people to try on the various sizes and wristband styles. Stock will probably be limited at launch, notes 9to5mac, and customers will need to schedule dedicated times to try the device on and buy it. This makes a certain degree of sense. With so many varieties from which to choose, consumers will want to be sure the model they pick is comfortable and attractive. Apple has long referred to the device as its most personal ever.

If you've got the cash to pay for the Apple Watch Edition, which ranges from $10,000 to $17,000, then you can expect a much more upscale experience from Apple.

Apple is telling employees the gold watch is "the ultimate expression of extraordinary craftsmanship, incredible innovation, and design driven by functionality and end use," and that it represents "technology becoming seductive, with desirability not necessarily defined simply by a price tag or elitism, but rather meticulous focus on usefulness and utility rooted in beauty."

In addition, "[m]ost Edition customers are interested in this collection for the intrinsic value that a gold watch offers along with the unique style choices available." In other words, Apple is going to treat people who walk in with wads of money like the upscale customers they are.

Apple Watch Edition buyers will be treated to private appointments with experts specially trained to work with high-end clientele, reports 9to5mac, citing sources familiar with Apple's plans. Given the high value of the wearable, customers will be allowed to have only two gold watches in hand at a time. Watch Edition purchases will have a special station with stools, and jewelry-store mats. Customers can have their watch set up by the in-store experts or through a new virtual personal setup option.

Apple will also provide Watch Edition buyers with dedicated 24/7 support for a period of two years.

The Watch Edition will reach the largest markets first. It will be an exclusive at Apple's most prominent stores in cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It will trickle down to other markets gradually. Customers will, however, be able to order the Watch Edition online and have it brought by courier to the Apple Store of their choice.

If you're an average Joe, you can expect a less personal experience. Standard Apple employees will be on hand to help Sport and Stainless Steel buyers, and will generally assist as many customers at a time as is practical.

Apple's well-monied customers can thank Angela Ahrendts for their Apple Watch Edition purchasing experience, who's now in charge of Apple retail store operations. Before joining the company, Ahrendts worked at Burberry in London.

It's safe to say the experience will be unique to Apple's wearable, at least at first. Makers of smartwatches running Google's Android Wear platform don't offer such luxuries. Motorola comes closest, perhaps, with its Moto Maker design experience, which lets people design their own smartwatch online.

Market analysis firm IDC expects wearables to explode in the coming years thanks to the hype surrounding the Apple Watch.

"Smart wearables are about to take a major step forward with the launch of the Apple Watch this year," Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC's Wearables team, wrote in a March 30 statement. "The Apple Watch raises the profile of wearables in general and there are many vendors and devices that are eager to share the spotlight. Basic wearables, meanwhile, will not disappear. In fact, we anticipate continued growth here as many segments of the market seek out simple, single-use wearable devices."

IDC predicts shipments of smart wearables will jump an astonishing 510.9% from 4.2 million in 2014 to 25.7 million in 2015.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of mobile device management (MDM) capabilities for Office 365. Customers of all Office 365 commercial plans, including Enterprise, Business, Education, and Government, can receive the built-in MDM features at no additional cost.

The news arrives a few months after Microsoft brought built-in mobile device management to Office 365 in October 2014. Now, users can manage their access to data within Office 365 across phones and tablets running on iOS, Android, or Windows.

Security plays a big role in the Office 365 MDM strategy, and Microsoft has implemented three key capabilities to help keep data secure. These include:

Device management: Management of multiple security policies, such as PIN lock and jailbreak detection, to protect corporate email and data from unauthorized users in the event a device is lost or stolen. Additional settings and reporting provide insight on who might be reading corporate information.

Conditional access: The ability to manage security policies on devices that connect to Office 365. This ensures that email and documents kept throughout Office 365 are only accessible on phones and tablets that are managed by the business. Conditional access is only applicable to business applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to ensure simpler processes for administrators.

Selective wipe: The ability to remove corporate data stored in Office 365 from an employee device without affecting his or her personal information. Going forward, this will be critical for businesses adopting BYOD policies for phones and tablets.

Employees and corporations seeking further protection may subscribe to Microsoft Intune, a component of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, which offers additional device management capabilities for phones, PCs, and tablets. Capabilities include the option to restrict actions, such as copy and paste, to applications solely managed by Intune to enhance security of business data.

"The pivot of managing Office via Intune is a big (and really proactive) step for the industry," wrote Microsoft corporate VP Brad Anderson in a blog post. "This enables the workforce to utilize the apps they love, while preventing data leakage -- and it empowers IT teams to constantly improve and streamline the services they deliver while maintaining strict security."

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

At the end of a speech given Friday, March 27, at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, Wheeler told the crowd the FCC’s new rules would be upheld by the courts.

Wheeler recalled that the DC Circuit sent the previous Open Internet Order back to them and told them they were trying to impose common carrier-like regulation without stepping up and saying they are common carriers.

"We have addressed that issue, which is the underlying issue in all of the debates we've had so far," Wheeler said. "That gives me great confidence going forward that we will prevail."

In a 3-2 vote in February, the FCC passed a new set of regulatory measures effectively banning broadband Internet service providers from deliberately slowing, blocking, or favoring specific sites and the content they deliver to the consumer market.

"We can have an open Internet policy that advances the interests of tens of thousands of innovators, and millions of Internet users; or we can have an open Internet policy that advances the interests of a few powerful companies," Wheeler said at the close of the speech. "The choice is clear. And I'm proud that the Commission has made the right choice, adopting strong, sustainable, and sensible open Internet protections."

Earlier this month, two lawsuits challenging the FCC were filed by Alamo Broadband from Texas and broadband industry trade organization USTelecom.

The trade group argues that the way the FCC is implementing the regulations, and not the regulations themselves, are illegal.

In a statement, USTelecom president Walter McCormick said with the reclassification of Title II regulation, the FCC has chosen the wrong path for achieving broadband deployment in all parts of the United States.

"The FCC could best facilitate further investment and competition in broadband services by focusing its efforts on removing the regulatory hurdles to a smooth transition to IP networks, fully implementing Phase II of the Connect America Fund, updating the rural Universal Service Fund for broadband, and taking additional steps to lower the costs of access to local rights-of-way and pole attachments that can make up 20 percent of the cost of deploying fiber," according to the USTelecom statement.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

"These days people are learning by sharing videos on YouTube or going to Kahn Academy, Coursera, or other sources online," explained Gretchen Alarcon, VP, HCM Strategy at Oracle in a phone interview with InformationWeek. "We looked at that trend and decided to bring that style of peer-to-peer learning into the enterprise."

Using smartphones or tablets, salespeople are sharing video product demos, retailers are creating how-to-merchandize videos, and field-service staff are capturing maintenance-and-repair videos, for example. Oracle Learning Cloud is designed to enable employees at any level to create such videos, and HR or business leaders can then curate these and other assets, such as images, infographics, documents, or even massively open online courses (MOOCs) into learning tracks geared to specific departments and roles.

"A manager can point to these tracks and say, 'I would like people in my organization to learn the following, so please follow this track,'" said Alarcon.

Oracle Learning Cloud can be used in stand-alone fashion, but it's also integrated with the Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud and its employee profile systems. Thus, employees can share with peers and promote career development on their own by following leaders and role models to see what videos or documents they've shared or watched.

Oracle is far from the first to observe the trend toward social, mobile, and particularly informal, video-based training. Independents including SumTotal and large rivals including IBM (with Kenexa) and SAP (with SuccessFactors) have already added informal social and mobile learning options to their portfolios. SAP is the most recent to embrace this approach, having introduced a Quick Guides capability within SuccessFactors last fall that lets people use an iOS or Android phone or tablet to create, publish, and share short learning modules including video, pictures, and text.

Oracle Learning Cloud, too, puts the emphasis on peer-to-peer content development. "HR and business leaders must … create a culture where employees want to share their knowledge and encourage them to engage with each other in new and creative ways," said Chris Leone, senior VP, Oracle HCM Development. "The new Oracle Learning Cloud helps companies provide employees with a consumer-like experience to help retain and develop the talent they need to be successful."

Oracle says Oracle Learning Cloud can be integrated with its more conventional LMS to create a comprehensive learning environment that supports formal training for regulated learning requirements.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Casual restaurant chains want to attract digitally savvy millennials more than any other segment of diners. They're trying social network campaigns and mobile apps to do just that. One of the latest stabs at engagement is table-top tablets from Ziosk, digital devices that are part menu, part waiter, part entertainment device, and part survey platform.

Used by Chili's, Red Robin, Abuelo's and other chains and deployed at more than 1,400 locations with 77,000-plus devices, Ziosk tablets give diners the option to browse a digital menu, place orders, request another round, play games, get social, and sign up for promotions. There's also a card reader attached to the 7-inch, Android-based device so diners can swipe their credit cards and pay without having to wait for a check. For the restaurant chain, Ziosk tablets offer a way to deliver promotions, improve service, conduct customer-satisfaction surveys, and gather intelligence on the dining experience.

How does Ziosk make sense of the data streaming in from 77,000-plus tablets? Part of that challenge is straightforward, as the Ziosk platform supports ordering food and paying checks, and for these functions it integrates with POS and loyalty program systems. Ziosk keeps a record of transactional information in an on-premises, Microsoft SQL Server-based data warehouse and can provide BI-style reporting at various levels, from individual stores to regions and headquarters.

As for the rest of the data, Ziosk uses Azure HDInsight, Microsoft's cloud-based Hadoop service, to capture and aggregate anonymized transactional records along with contextual information, including click paths on each device, promotions delivered during a visit, email club enrollments, and other interactions. Thus far, Ziosk has collected several terabytes worth of data.

Ziosk chose HDInsights "because it can be difficult to do aggregations in a relational database," says Kevin Mowry, Ziosk's chief software architect. "We wanted to use a big data tool so we could look at textual information and other data types and formats that tell us what people are seeing, what they're clicking on, and how much time they're spending on the device."

Once aggregations of interest are available, Ziosk uses the Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) service to spot patterns of behavior at different time periods within visits, whether it's arrival, ordering, dining, ordering desert, or paying the check.

"Given these buckets of time, we look at how on-screen promotions influence the guest purchase behavior," says Mowry. "We're exploring whether we can do a better job of offering the right kinds of promotions when the guest is most receptive so we can increase business."

Visualizing Azure ML results through Power BI, Microsoft's cloud-based data-visualization environment, Ziosk has learned, for example, that guests that order beverages within the first five minutes of arrival are more likely than other customers to play games. Ziosk can then alter pre-scripted triggers to deliver gaming promotions soon after beverages are ordered.

At this writing, Ziosk is still doing modeling and predictive work to learn about customer behavior patterns. The vision is to eventually run Ziosk interactions against predictive models in real-time so each diner will have a dynamic, interactive experience.

"A lot of our customers are interested in doing A-B testing, and this is one of the tools we can provide to evaluate the effectiveness of different tests that we're doing inside the restaurant," Mowry said.

Ziosk isn't the only provider of interactive, table-top devices. Applebee’s and Johnny Rockets are rolling out tablets developed by E la Carte Inc. We can't predict that every diner will like this sort of digital dining experience, but there's no doubt that we're going to see more of these devices in bars and restaurants near you.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Anyone who’s worked in IT for more than a minute knows that the ability to keep up with fast-changing technologies can make or break your career. This is particularly true right now for anyone whose job involves working with applications related to big data, business intelligence, and business analysis.

Tech vendors typically offer a wide range of big data certification programs to help you master your use of their products and services. Conventional wisdom has it that developing your expertise and becoming certified in certain tools will help advance your own career.

But there are only so many hours in a day, and those hours include doing your day job. Deciding which big data vendor certifications are right for you to pursue can feel a bit like navigating a maze.

Vendors including IBM, HP, Oracle, EMC, and Cloudera are among those offering certification programs for IT professionals working with big data. Some are geared to folks working in the channel, or as consultants, while others are targeted toward the end user. We can’t tell you which to choose -- that depends on a number of variables, including your position, the demands of your current work situation, whether or not you have access to tuition support, and what your long-term goals are.

What we can do is provide you with a selected list of the vendor certifications available.

On the following pages, you’ll find details on various vendor certification programs, including what they offer, how much they cost, and what kind of letters you’ll be able to put on your business card upon completion of the programs. Check out the latest big data vendor certification programs featured here, and let us know what you think.

Did we miss any that are crucial to working with big data? Have you pursued certification in any areas of IT during your career? If so, how has it helped you? If not, tell us why. We’re waiting to hear from you in the comments section below.